


Homecoming

by charimiel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Hale Family, Based on a song, Everyone lives, Gen, Human AU, Pre-Slash, derek still has problems, due to reasons not stated here, with emotional constipation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-02
Updated: 2014-03-02
Packaged: 2018-01-14 08:38:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1259977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charimiel/pseuds/charimiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, you can find a piece of home in the strangest of places.</p>
<p>The one where Derek roams the highway, Stiles owns a diner, and there are way too many coincidences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

The road stretches out in front of Derek, invitingly simple and empty as always, but the light is fading fast and his stomach is growling. The rain has just started to tap against the windscreen of his car, and he keeps driving down the empty road, looking for somewhere to grab a meal and stay the night. It’s about 10 minutes before he reaches a turnoff, with another nondescript diner in the middle of nowhere. He turns off the road, pulls into the parking lot, and locks his Camaro before walking briskly through the rain to the front entrance.

He pushes his way inside and heads to a booth, just like he has in every diner he’s eaten in for the last 2 months. All the diners seem to blend into one nowadays, night after night of the same food with the same prices and the same dreary décor. But it’s food, and it’s warm, so he can’t complain.

He’s been sitting for a minute or so before it occurs to him that no one else is actually in the room, and his gaze flicks to the door- no, it’s definitely open; the neon light in the door is shining bright and obnoxious.

He’s considering getting up, taking a look in the back to see if anyone’s actually around, when a waiter pushes through from the back room, looking tired and surprised to see him sitting there.

‘Don’t get many customers then?’ Derek asks, his voice rough from all the time spent in silence with only his own company. The guy seems to snap out of whatever trance he’d slipped into, and responds with a noncommittal,

‘Nah, not really’, walking over to Derek. His nametag says ‘Stiles’, and what the hell kinda name is that? ‘What can I get you?’ Stiles asks, his brown eyes scanning him up and down, no doubt cataloguing the weary pose, the bags under his eyes, the tired lonely eyes.

‘Coffee, and whatever foods good, I don’t care.’ Derek says wearily. He thinks about stopping sometimes, the road is lonely and long, and times like these when he’s reminded that other people exist, it almost doesn’t feel worth it.

Stiles looks at him, seems to see everything, and smiles a sad crooked smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, before sweeping off towards the entrance to the back.

Some time passes, it could be minutes or it could be hours, Derek loses track staring out of the window. The rain is lashing down, making it impossible to see further than a few feet from the window, but he knows that even if he could see outside, he’s just see another unfamiliar road.

Stiles comes back, slides a bowl of soup over to him along with a plate of bread, and places a clean white mug full of steaming coffee in front of him. There’s the scrape of a chair across the ground, and Derek looks up from his tempting meal to see Stiles sitting across from him, his own mug of coffee in his hand.

‘You don’t mind?’ Stiles asks. ‘It gets lonely in this place, and you look like you could use some company ‘

Derek looks at him, and mutters ‘its fine’, before starting on his soup.

‘So. I’m Stiles. As you probably gathered from the badge.’

Derek responds with silence.

‘I’m pretty sure this is the point where you say your name? I mean, I haven’t had much human interaction for a while, but I’m fairly sure about this social cue at least?’

‘Derek’

‘Nice to meet you Derek. Where you headed then?’

Derek looks up and meets his eyes. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Everyone who comes through’s going somewhere, just wondering where you’re headed.’

‘I don’t know’

‘You can’t not know dude’

‘I’m not headed anywhere. And don’t call me dude.’

‘Yeah whatever. Where you from then?’

‘Originally? California’ Derek reveals, wondering why he’s telling Stiles even as he says it. He normally eats alone, avoids questions, hates them. But there’s something about this diner on this cold wet night, with Stiles’s eager but sad eyes across from him.

‘No way, me too! What part?’

‘Beacon Hills, it’s a litt-’ Stiles sits up straight.

‘You’re kidding right.’

‘What?’

‘Dude, I’m from Beacon Hills! Stiles Stilinski at your service!’

‘The sheriff’s kid?’

‘Yup, that’s me, sheriff’s kid, owning a crappy highway diner. Wait… Derek? Derek Hale?’

Derek flinches and takes a long sip from his coffee to try and hide his reaction, but Stiles clearly notices anyway.

‘Sorry? I mean, I know your mum; she invited me and my dad over for dinner the last time I was in town. Everyone thought you’d just dropped out the world dude, your family were worried as hell last I heard.’

‘What? Why?’ Derek asks, brow crinkling in confusion. ‘I told them I was going on a road trip’

‘I think they expected maybe a phone call or two y’know, just so they knew you hadn’t died or something?’

Derek blinks his expression indecipherable. ‘Oh. I just figured they’d…’ he tails off, not actually sure what he’d thought. Stiles is looking at him, not judgementally, or with pity, just concern. It throws him off; he doesn’t quite know how to react. People normally glare at him, or flirt with him, or ignore him. H’s not used to concern from someone who is essentially just another stranger.

To be perfectly honest, he’s forgotten how to deal with concern full stop, but from Stiles it seems even stranger, puts him on edge. He’s not sure if it’s a good feeling or not, it seems new but also old and familiar, and he feels like a child all over again despite being older than the guy across from him.

‘Can I borrow your cellphone?’ he asks, electing to ignore the feeling. Stiles hands it over, and Derek dials the familiar number with nervousness coiling in his gut.

His mom picks up. He feels a hotness behind his eyes when he hears her speak, and his voice is just a little bit choked when he says ‘mom?’

There’s a tense silence for a moment, and Derek doesn’t think either of them are breathing, but then there’s a sob down the line and a similarly choked out ‘Der?’ Her voice is thicker than usual, and he thinks she must be crying.

He feels stupidly guilty for not realising what disappearing would do to his mom, to his family. There’s shouting coming from the phone, not at him but to everyone else in the house. He tries to comfort her, but she hushes him and tells him she’s just happy he’s safe.

He can hear Laura in the background calling him a dick, and it feels so familiar it hurts. The phone is passed around, a few minutes with everyone. His sisters mainly use the time to verbally abuse him, because ‘it’s not like anyone else will tell him to grow up mom it’s my responsibility as an older sister!’

He starts crying in earnest when Amy asks if he’s coming home now. He doesn’t even care if Stiles sees; he’d forgotten how important his family were to him after everything that happened. In all his wishing to run away, put the past behind him, he never realised he’d be leaving the good behind along with the bad.

The phone call doesn’t last long, it’s 2 am in Beacon Hills and he was lucky anyone even answered in the first place. He promises to call again soon, before taking longer than he should t hang up, not quite ready to say goodbye again.

When he slides the phone back to Stiles across the table, he looks up. He’s not sure what he thinks he’ll see, but it’s not the fond grin on the other man’s face.  It feels like something new.

And when they spend the whole night talking about anything and everything, about religion, and the reason Derek ran, and the reason Stiles owns a diner on a distant highway from where he belongs, and how sometimes he just wants to escape from it all, Derek doesn’t mind in the slightest. Not even when he wakes with his face pressed against the table, Stiles’s inches from him as he dozes.

He’s not ready to go home yet, but in this little diner, hundreds of miles from where he comes from and whoever knows how far from where he’ll end up, he feels like he’s come home.

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the Vienna Teng song 'Homecoming (Walters song)' and written at about 1 am.  
> A little fic to post while I work on the 2 monsters I'm halfway through at the moment.


End file.
